Page 155 - Train to Pakistan

Hukum Chand felt wretched. The night had fallen. Frogs called from the river.
Fireflies twinkled about the jasmines near the veranda. The bearer had brought

whisky and Hukum Chand had sent it away. The bearer had laid out the dinner
but he had not touched the food. He had the lamp removed and sat alone in the
dark, staring into space.

Why had he let the girl go back to Chundunnugger? Why? he asked himself,
hitting his forehead with his fist. If only she were here in the rest house with
him, he would not bother if the rest of the world went to hell. But she was not

here; she was in the train. He could hear its rumble.
Hukum Chand slid off his chair, covered his face with his arms and started to
cry. Then he raised his face to the sky and began to pray.

A little after eleven, the moon came up. It looked tired and dissipated. It flooded
the plain with a weary pale light in which everything was a little blurred. Near
the bridge there was very little moonlight. The high railway embankment cast a

wall of dark shadow.
Sandbags, which had guarded the machine-gun nest near the signal, were
littered about on either side of the railway tracks. The signal scaffolding stood

like an enormous sentry watching over the scene. Two large oval eyes, one on
top of the other, glowed red. The two hands of the signal stood stiffly parallel to
each other. The bushes along the bank looked like a jungle. The river did not

glisten; it was like a sheet of slate with just a suspicion of a ripple here and there.
A good distance from the embankment, behind a thick cluster of pampas, was
a jeep with its engine purring gently. There was no one in it. The men had spread

themselves on either side of the railway line a few feet from each other. They sat
on their haunches with their rifles and spears between their legs. On the first
steel span of the bridge a thick rope was tied horizontally above the railway line.

It was about twenty feet above the track.
It was too dark for the men to recognize each other. So they talked loudly.
Then somebody called.

‘Silence! Listen!’
They listened. It was nothing. Only the wind in the reeds.
‘Silence anyhow,’ came the command of the leader. ‘If you talk like this, you

will not hear the train in time.’
They began to talk in whispers.
There was a shimmy-shammy noise of trembling steel wires as one of the